Dripworks, part one: The Order

Glory be, it’s gardening time! You know, we’ve been working on our gardens here at Hello House for 2.5 years now, and there’s still so much work to do. Which I think is great. How sad would it be if all our planting was done in the first year?

One of the reasons we aren’t done planting is we lost a few astilbe and two pieris japonica to drought last year. And by drought, I mean we didn’t water them enough.

Everything’s gonna be different this year, because this week I’m installing our new Dripworks irrigation system. This is a modular, DIY system. It’s totally customizable and also amazingly inexpensive. For $85, I got more than enough supplies to keep our eight garden beds nicely watered. They even have a free design service to help you figure out what components you need (though I didn’t take them up on that).

Here’s one of the things we need most. It’s called a Shrubbler. It’s basically a mini-sprinkler with a maximum spray of 18″ or so. I’m going to put one under each of our thirsty trees and shrubs. These are adjustable, so we can make sure each plant gets just the right amount of water over its entire root structure. Pretty sweet.

So, what did $85 get us?

100 ft of mainline tubing (for getting from the spigots to the beds)

100 ft of soaker line (for watering throughout the beds)

100 ft of smaller tubing (for connecting the shrubblers to the main lines)

15 shrubblers (for keeping our shrubs and trees happy)

40 transfer barbs (for every place the tubing branches off)

30 goof plugs (for plugging unused holes and ends of tubing)

3 quick-connect couplers (for each place the tubing will cross a sidewalk—so we can disconnect the tubing and tuck it out of sight when we aren’t watering)

100 U-shaped staples (for keeping the tubing in place)

a bunch of connectors and plugs (for connecting the tubing to the spigots and keeping the lines clean)

Seems like a great deal to me.

Pics of the installation coming soon. (Plus a review later in the season, once we know how it works.)